Conflict over Settlement: The Case of Curiepe

By the end of the seventeenth century, although some Caracas vecinos had forgotten who had first explored the lower Tuy River and environs, the value of the region had become evident to everyone. Controversies over land titles in the Tuy had created a boom in legal business in Caracas that paralleled the booming prosperity of the cacao business in the region. As the history of the settlement of Curiepe demonstrates, high station and influence were useful weapons in the competition for land. It is also evident that by the beginning of the century there was already a concern for the supply and cost of labor to work the new haciendas.

In March 1699, during his last month as governor of Venezuela, don Francisco de Berrotarán sent three dozen men to look for the gold mines of "Apa y Carapa" in the hills south of the Tuy. With Tomusa Indians as guides, these men spent six weeks looking for gold where they believed "los antiguos " had found it at the time of the conquest of Caracas. Struggling in torrential rains and opposed by resident Indians, they found nothing. Nevertheless, and there is good reason to suppose that this was the primary reason for the venture, as soon as his men returned Governor Berrotarán began to request title to the land in the area on the basis of the 7800 pesos he had invested in its exploration.

Berrotarán remained in Caracas after his administration of the colony ended, and in 1702, the same year that he was granted the title of first Marqués del Valle de Santiago, he received from the crown legal title to a vast region south of the lower Tuy called "Apacarapa." It turned out, however, that his title was in conflict with others held by Pedro de Ponte y Andrade, a Spanish immigrant from La Coruña, Galicia, who had come to Caracas before 1679. Ponte complained to the crown that the search for gold mines was part of a scheme to grab land from people, like himself, who had already planted cacao in the area. Over the course of several

years Ponte had acquired 79 slaves from the Portuguese asiento, and these slaves had been at work on his Tuy Valley cacao hacienda for some time. Ponte acknowledged that it was possible for Berrotarán to buy 200 slaves, as he planned to do, because this quantity was occasionally available for sale in Caracas, but Ponte doubted that the new marqués had the money to make such a purchase. More importantly, even if Berrotarán bought 200 slaves, Ponte argued that it would be impossible for him to support them for the several years that would pass before the cacao trees matured and bore fruit. There were good profits to be made from cacao agriculture in the Tuy, Ponte acknowledged, but it was a very expensive business to begin from scratch on a large scale. With pointed irony, Ponte suggested that unless his adversary discovered the gold mines he had ostensibly set out to find, Berrotarán would not be able to feed his slaves while they brought his first cacao crop to harvest, "it being very expensive to keep slaves in the Tuy." As perhaps his best argument in defense of his property, Ponte reminded the king that if Berrotarán's titles were upheld and he lost his right to continue to grow cacao on his established hacienda, the monarchy would forfeit the revenues that were already being collected on the exports of Ponte's cacao beans.^[3] Yet Ponte underestimated either his rival's wealth or the capacity of the Tuy to turn a quick profit. In the long run both men were successful there, and in 1720 their heirs were owners of the largest cacao haciendas in the Tuy: Miguel Berrotarán Tovar, the second Marqués del Valle, had a cacao estate of 30,000 trees in the Tuy in that year, and Pedro Ponte Marín, the eldest son of Pedro de Ponte y Andrade, had an even larger Tuy hacienda of some 50,000 trees.

Much of the land in the Tuy Valley had been claimed before the end of the seventeenth century by powerful recent immigrants like Berrotarán or by long-established Caracas residents like Ponte y Andrade. By the beginning of the next century the opportunities created by high cacao prices paid in the expanding New Spain market made the region very attractive to would-be cacao farmers who were neither politically powerful nor members of entrenched local families. The mantuanos , as members of the foremost Caracas families were called in the eighteenth century, fought legal and political battles with groups of these ambitious newcomers for Tuy cacao property. The newcomers, pioneers who were willing to set-

tle on their frontier estates, fought among themselves as well. Illustrative of this conflict is the particularly well-documented struggle over the right to settle and plant cacao in the Curiepe Valley, located in the hills north of the lower Tuy some 20 leagues from Caracas, about halfway between the river and the Caribbean coast. More than a simple dispute at law over land on a remote frontier, the fight for Curiepe became part of some of the most important social and political issues of the day, including the new Bourbon regime's first efforts at centralizing its colonial authority and the challenge this presented to the traditional rights of the Caracas cabildo to govern the province in the absence of the governor.

Payment of a fee to the crown in 1663 had given the mantuano Juan Blanco de Villegas title to Curiepe land that was said to comprise an entire square league. In the early eighteenth century, two different groups challenged the exclusive rights of the Blanco de Villegas in Curiepe. Entirely without success in their effort was a large group of Canary Islanders, a total of 413 people in 73 families, who first petitioned the crown in 1728 for parcels of land drained by the Curiepe River. One of the leaders of the isleños then seeking land was Juan Francisco de León, who would, twenty years later, lead a large band of irate Tuy residents to Caracas to protest the policies of the Guipuzcoana Company. According to their petition in 1728, 60 of the Canary Islander families had been living in the immediate vicinity of Caracas and in the town proper for two decades. They had first gone out to Venezuela at the urging of the crown, but they had never been given land to plant as they had been promised, having been obliged instead, for all the ensuing years, to work as sharecroppers in the fields of others. The canarios recognized the legality of the Blanco de Villegas claim to Curiepe, but they argued that they should be given some of the property since nothing had ever been done by the family to put the land to productive use, and that it would be at best many more years before the Blanco family could acquire the slaves they needed to establish a profitable hacienda there.

To give their case the appearance of something more noble than their own self-interest, the petitioners concluded by depicting for the crown a dire scenario that could result if they were not given the opportunity to settle Curipe. They warned that their competitors in the region, a group of free blacks, morenos libres , who were

also soliciting titles, had already illegally built houses and planted cacao at Curiepe. These blacks, the canarios argued, would multiply greatly in the sparsely populated zone. The petitioners believed that the danger inherent in this situation was obvious, but they recounted for the king rumors of English buccaneers who had raided the region in 1710, carrying off some cattle and a few slaves. The whole region could become a "Nueva Jamayca ," they warned, should the English return to find a large community of free people of color in Curiepe, people unsupervised and of uncertain loyalty, who would most certainly offer no resistance to the invaders. If the Blanco de Villegas titles were disallowed and they were given permission to settle, as trustworthy and hardworking subjects the canarios offered themselves as entirely suitable replacements for the morenos who were occupying Curiepe in violation of both the Blanco titles and the best interests of the empire.^[4]

For their part, by the 1720s the morenos libres in Curiepe had earned a precarious right to their settlement after a fortuitous series of events punctuated by sharp turns of fortune.^[5] Many of them had come to the Indies as Dutch slaves, and they had gained their liberty in a rather remarkable fashion. From 1702 to 1704 some thirty Africans, fleeing their Dutch masters on the island of Curaçao, crossed the narrow stretch of sea separating the island from the Venezuelan mainland. Carried westward by the prevailing winds and current, they arrived finally at the coastal town of Coro, where they were seized by the municipal authorities and put up for sale at public auction. This was probably not the first time that fugitive Dutch slaves in pursuit of their freedom had ended up as the bondsmen of Spaniards on the Venezuelan coast, but the destiny of these slaves was to be different, for in 1701, by means of some deft diplomacy, the French had replaced the Portuguese as holders of exclusive rights to supply Spain's colonies with African slaves.^[6] The French factor of the asiento de negros in Coro claimed that the auction had been illegal, since by contract and by treaty he had the unique right to sell slaves entered into Spanish territory, including those who entered while fleeing from foreign masters. In 1703 the case was brought before the Audiencia of Santo Domingo, a venue with little sympathy for the French cause, since that island had been forcefully divided into French and Spanish portions only in 1697. Citing a real cédula dated November 1697, in which slaves

fleeing from the French district of Santo Domingo to the Spanish zone were given their freedom, the Audiencia declared in 1704 that the Dutch slaves in Coro were also to be freed. As had been the case in Santo Domingo, the Coro libres were also to receive sufficient land so that they might support themselves. This totally unanticipated decision both denied the French factor his profits and the Coro vecinos the slaves they had expected. Word of the Audiencia's order spread quickly, but many Spaniards refused to comply with it. The order went largely unenforced until 1711, when another forty fugitives arrived from Curaçao. Most of these slaves were also seized and put to work for new masters, but some of them, together with a few of those who had been freed earlier, went to Caracas to petition the governor for their freedom and the land they were to be given by law.^[7]

The governor in Caracas from 1711 to 1714 was José Francisco de Cañas y Merino, son of the sergeant major of the Spanish presidio at Orán, Africa. Cañas had been raised at Orán, and had risen in the ranks there to become captain of the infantry. As governor he supported the cause of the Curaçao refugees, and, perhaps as a gesture of defiance directed at the Caracas elite,^[8] he instructed the freedmen to join the town's newly formed free black militia unit. The captain of this unit, the Compañía de Morenos Libres , was a mulatto, Juan del Rosario Blanco, who was named to the position by Cañas in 1711. He had been the slave, and was probably the illegitimate son, of don Alejandro Blanco de Villegas, heir to the Curiepe land. Juan del Rosario could read and write, and he was a popular leader of Caracas's free people of color. In 1715, the year after his patron Cañas had been forcibly removed from office, Juan del Rosario sent a memorial to the king in the name of his compañía, asking for land in compliance with the order given by the Audiencia of Santo Domingo in 1704. The memorial stated that the twenty-one freed Dutch slaves who belonged to his militia had not received land as the court had ordered, and that many other former slaves released by the Audiencia lived scattered about the countryside without legal means to sustain themselves and without the benefit of priest or religion.

Juan del Rosario provided the monarch with a brief description of the geography of the Venezuelan coastline east of the port at La Guaira. For a distance sixteen or eighteen leagues the valleys of this

barlovento (windward) coast were filled with cacao haciendas; but beyond the valley of Chuspa, where the coastline falls away to the south, forming Cape Codera with its extensive bay known as Higuerote, there were no settlements or haciendas. Protected there from the prevailing westerly winds, ships of all kinds bound for La Guaira and beyond stopped at Higuerote to make sure of their bearings and to make sure that the coast was clear of pirates before continuing down the open Venezuelan coast. The strategic importance was twofold: first, unguarded, it was an attractive rendezvous for pirates, and second, it would be an ideal point of disembarkation for a land invasion of the colony. Juan del Rosario proposed that the morenos libres of his militia unit and others who had subscribed to his plan be allowed to settle in an area about five leagues west of the Higuerote coast called by him Sabana del Oro. This would comply with the Audiencia order to give the freed slaves land, and, since many of them were soldiers in the king's militia, their presence would control contraband and slow down any foreign army that might be put ashore there until aid could be sent from Caracas.

According to the proposal, once established the community would receive a priest named by the bishop in Caracas, and its inhabitants would recognize the local authority of a lieutenant named by the governor. To give their petition added respectability, the claimants reminded the king of a similar settlement of mulattos established by royal decree in New Spain; their community would be "an imitation of the one created in Vera Cruz, on the barlovento coast there, that they call San Miguel de la Antigua."^[9]

The site referred to by Juan del Rosario as Sabana del Oro was in fact Curiepe, as he no doubt knew, and the mantuano family of Blanco de Villegas was quick to point out that fact in Caracas. The petition met with complete silence from the cabildo and the governor, and the cause of the morenos libres would most likely have advanced no further had it not been for the disjunctures and juridical confusion that befell the colony after 1719, when the word arrived in Caracas that the province of Venezuela had been transferred from Santo Domingo to the executive authority of the newly created viceroyalty of New Granada and the judicial authority of the Audiencia of Santa Fe de Bogotá.^[10] As it turned out, the resulting disorder in Caracas allowed the morenos libres their chance to lay what proved to be a lasting claim to the Curiepe Valley.

The viceroy of New Granada took immediate interest in this new dominion, and in 1720 two of his agents, designated jueces comisionarios , arrived in Caracas. These men were charged with the responsibility of investigating the state of the royal treasury, making a census of the Indian population, and putting an end to contraband trade. An imbroglio quickly formed between these viceregal agents, Pedro Martín de Beato and Pedro José de Olavarriaga, who were Basques, and the Canary Islander governor, Marcos de Betancourt y Castro. From Bogotá the viceroy, Jorge de Villalonga, without having had time to receive Betancourt's defense of charges made against him by Beato and Olavarriaga, ordered the governor jailed for smuggling and other crimes. Licenciado Antonio José Alvarez y Abreu, who had come with Beato and Olavarriaga ostensibly as a legal advisor, was told to assume Betancourt's gubernatorial duties. This action violated the traditional privilege of the Caracas cabildo to act as interim governor, and the town council's regidores made an appeal to the viceroy. In no uncertain terms, threatening fines of 4000 pesos, arrest and transport to Bogotá, Villalonga ordered the cabildo to comply. Intimidated, the cabildo did comply, and from March until December 1721 Alvarez y Abreu exercised the governor's authority. During this time Juan del Rosario and the morenos libres would found a settlement at Curiepe.

In June 1721, governor pro tem Alvarez y Abreu granted Juan del Rosario a license to reconnoiter the Sabana del Oro site in preparation for the pueblo that he and his militiamen wanted to establish there. This license was understood by the morenos to be in fact permission to begin the settlement, and construction was begun. With sixteen houses and a church of wattle and daub clustered around a plaza, Juan del Rosario made clear to the governor the full range of his ambitious plans for Curiepe. In a letter he asked Alvarez y Abreu to order his lieutenants on the coast and the interior valleys to send to Caracas all the runaway slaves that they might capture. He asked that all these cimarrones then be "given to the Capitán and founder of Sabana del Oro, for the better establishment and increase of said Sabana."^[11] Not surprisingly, this audacious relocation scheme never received serious consideration, but the settlement of morenos at Curiepe was established. In spite of subsequent efforts to remove them, they remained there, and, as it turned out, more than a few cimarrones would find their own way to the Curiepe region.

The decade of the 1720s was marked by a chaos of governance in Caracas which would, among its several major consequences, have a lasting effect on the way the Tuy was administered and on the attitudes of Tuy settlers toward royal and regional authority. Alvarez y Abreu was replaced in December 1721 by a new permanent governor, Diego Portales y Meneses, who immediately became involved in a serious controversy with both the viceroy in Bogotá and the Caracas cabildo. In the entire eighteenth century, the disorder created by the political struggles of the first years of the 1720s would be surpassed only by the open rebellion of 1749. Portales was as quick to take authority from the viceregal triumvirate of Beato, Olavarriaga, and Alvarez y Abreu as they had been to deny it to the previous governor Betancourt. Portales expelled Alvarez y Abreu and imprisoned Beato and Olavarriaga, acts that won him the approval of the Caracas elite. But the governor then lost his local support by curiously insisting that the bishop occupy his office rather than the cabildo while he made an obligatory tour of the province. The cabildo appealed this infringement to Spain, and in January 1723 a royal cédula was received in Caracas which reaffirmed the town council's right to replace the governor on an interim basis with its alcaldes ordinarios. Neither viceroys nor the governors themselves could abrogate this privilege.

Two months later an order for Portales's arrest arrived from Bogotá, citing his rough treatment of the viceroy's agents the previous year. This time local sensitivities were respected, and the order carefully stipulated that the cabildo would assume gubernatorial authority. From the Caracas jail, Portales complained to the king, and in response to his appeal a second cédula arrived from Spain late in 1723. Contradicting both tradition and the previous instructions, this order gave Portales his freedom and granted him permission to name the bishop, Escalona y Calatayud, as his temporary replacement. He was also told to disregard any challenge to his authority that might come from the viceroy of New Granada.

Armed with this support, Portales began a determined vendetta against certain prominent Caraqueños who had been responsible for his incarceration. In turn, these opponents turned for help to influential friends in the viceregal government, with the result that Portales was free for only a few months when, in February 1724, the Audiencia of Santa Fe demanded that the Caracas cabildo arrest him once again. Placed in chains and even in the stocks for a time,

Portales remained in jail for a month before he escaped and took refuge in the residence of his ally Escalona. The bishop tried to assume the governorship on the basis of the most recent royal missive, but the cabildo rejected the effort, claiming that the governor could not make appointments while under arrest in the Caracas jail. At this point, with the question of jurisdiction in complete confusion, and the practical matter of authority reduced to simple power, both sides took up arms. Bloodshed was averted because the cabildo faction had far greater support in the community than Portales and Escalona, and when Portales escaped to the coastal valley of Ocumare the confrontation ended, with no more immediate damage done than widespread anger. The bishop vented his feelings by excommunicating the alcaldes of the cabildo, but in time tempers cooled, the ecclesiastical dictate was removed, and a third royal cédula, sent in response to an appeal to the crown made by Escalona, brought Portales back to the governor's residence in June 1726. He remained in formal control of the colony until he was replaced in 1728.^[12]

Central to an understanding of this controversy is the challenge that the viceroyalty of New Granada presented to the prerogatives of the Caracas governor. It was the responsibility and privilege of the governor, who in Venezuela was also chief military office as captain-general, to appoint officers who represented his authority in the rural districts of the province. This official, known by the title of teniente de justicia mayor , administered an often extensive jurisdiction. In the first decades of the eighteenth century there were three of these positions in the vicinity of Caracas: responsibility for the coast was given to a castellano y justicia mayor who also administered both the fort and the commercial activities of the port of La Guaira; a second lieutenant executed the king's justice in the Tuy region from the town of Ocumare del Tuy to the mouth of the river; while a third oversaw a jurisdiction that extended south of Caracas to Santa Lucía on the lower Guaire River. In addition to these regional officers, eight Hispanic corregidores were located in towns with Indian populations.^[13] Tenientes could name assistants, or cabos , to patrol the more remote zones of their jurisdictions. As judges of first instance, these men had a variety of responsibilities, but principal among them were the duties of pursuing runaway slaves and preventing contraband trade. To supplement their modest salaries,

all of these officials were entitled to retain a portion of the illegally transported cacao or other contraband merchandise which they seized.

The system of tenientes gave the governor at least nominal control over policing and the exercise of justice in the countryside, and also provided him with positions that he could use for patronage purposes. Until 1717, the names of men nominated for these positions were referred to the Audiencia of Santo Domingo for approval, and the Audiencia had always confirmed the governors' nominations as a matter of course.^[14] But the transfer of administration to the viceroy of New Granada and the Audiencia of Santa Fe brought significant changes to Caracas. Enthusiastic about controlling Venezuelan smuggling, the viceroy sent his own agents, the jueces de comiso Beato and Olavarriage, whose authority in the countryside superseded that of the governor-appointed tenientes. Resistance by Governor Betancourt to this challenge of his traditional prerogatives resulted in his imprisonment on the charge that he was himself a contrabandista . To enforce the effort to centralize control from Bogotá, Betancourt was removed from office altogether and replaced, not by the alcaldes of the Caracas cabildo, but by Alvarez y Abreu, who could then appoint tenientes to the liking of the viceroy, without any regard whatsoever for local sentiment. In a related matter, with blatant disregard for local opinion, Alvarez y Abreu granted Juan del Rosario permission to found a settlement of ex-slaves at Curiepe.

For the principal citizens of Caracas, who may or may not have benefited very much from smuggling, centralization from the distant viceregal capital meant that their influence in the rural hinterland of the Caracas province was diminished along with that of the governor. The vecinos' influence traditionally was dependent on their ability to persuade the governor to support their view—for instance, to be lax in his persecution of smugglers. In the case of Portales, his initial efforts to resist the viceroy's agents struck a blow in favor of regional autonomy that Caraqueños could applaud, but then, by denying the cabildo its right to replace him on a temporary basis, the governor demonstrated an unwillingness to share power. He then became an opponent of the colonists rather than their ally. To the relief of the Caracas elite, in 1726 the judicial responsibility for Venezuela was returned to the Audiencia of

Santo Domingo, and with it the authority of the governor was restored to the status quo ante .

The significance of these events went far beyond the particular case of the settlement of Curiepe, but the resolution of the controversy there demonstrates clearly the powerful impact on all claimants of the highly inconstant royal authority. The morenos continued to plant cacao while power struggles distracted Caracas, but the arrival of Portales and the eclipse of Alvarez y Abreu nearly brought to an end the Curiepe plans of Juan del Rosario. In 1722, while Portales was still on favorable terms with the Caracas mantuanos, Francisco de Monasterios presented the governor with the Blanco de Villegas titles to Curiepe and requested a ruling against the morenos who had no legal right to reside there. Monasterios's wife, Adriana Blanco Villegas, had died in 1721, and his interests in preventing Juan del Rosario from inhabiting the region were probably related to his wife's inheritance there. Portales responded to the Monasterios petition by ordering the destruction of the Curiepe settlement in September 1722. Although houses were burned and crops destroyed, the morenos remained in the vicinity of Curiepe, and in 1723, perhaps unsure to which jurisdiction his case belonged, Juan del Rosario sent appeals to both the Audiencia of Santo Domingo and the Audiencia of Sante Fe.

The final phase of the protracted conflict over Curiepe began in March 1724, with the death of Alejandro Blanco de Villegas. He had always been lukewarm in his resistance to the Curiepe efforts of Juan del Rosario Blanco, who was most likely his unrecognized son. Alejandro Blanco's widow, doña Luisa Catalina Martínez de Villegas, felt no similar compunctions, and in June 1724 she opened a vigorous campaign against "the violent pretensions of the negro Juan del Rosario, my liberto ." In her petition to the Audiencia of Santa Fe, which would finally reach the Council of the Indies for judgment, she argued that there was no valid comparison to be made between the settlement of freed slaves in distant, isolated Curiepe and the land given to their counterparts in Santo Domingo, which was "within view" of the established colony on that Caribbean island. Her opponent's privileged relationship with her husband (she referred to the moreno militia captain disparagingly as her personal servant, or page: "Juan Page, alias del Rosario ") had given rise to the whole problem. The morenos had never re-

ceived actual permission from either governor or viceroy to settle Curiepe or any other place, and they had lied about the location of Sabana del Oro, which was in fact Curiepe, land that belonged to her and her children as heirs of her husband.^[15]

While both parties waited for a decision from the institutions of higher justice, the cabildo took revenge on what it considered to be the pretensions of Juan del Rosario. Early in 1725, with Portales in hiding and the alcaldes ordinarios exercising gubernatorial authority, they relieved Juan del Rosario of the captaincy of the militia, using his advanced age as an excuse. However, Rosario and the moreno community had become pawns in the very serious play for power that dominated Caracas after 1722, and when Portales regained the governor's office in June 1726 he reversed the ruling of his opponents on the cabildo and restored Rosario to his militia command.^[16]

In that year the Audiencia in Santo Domingo ordered the governor to send copies of all the documents pertaining to the Curiepe dispute, and to make no further changes in the status of the settlement until a final decision could be made. It was at this point that the landless Canary Islanders who had been working as laborers made their bid for land and a town in the Curiepe region of the Tuy Valley, ostensibly to protect the province from foreign invasion and the dubious loyalty of the morenos there. Gaining no support from Portales, the canarios were no doubt surprised to find that the morenos of Curiepe, their estwhile competitors, were willing to make common cause with them. A joint petition arguing that there was room for more than one settlement at Curipe was sent to Santo Domingo, and the response from the Audiencia appeared to reward this combined effort with a decisive victory. The decision of the Audiencia, issued in December 1728, was unequivocal:

It is declared that the lands of the Valley of Curiepe, Sabana del Oro, Cabo de Codera, and the Ensenada de Higuerote belong to his Majesty, and the heirs of Don Juan Blanco de Villegas are to be returned the quantity of one hundred and seven and a half pesos, the value of the composition fee that they paid for titles to the Valley of Curiepe, but [since] the titles had never been confirmed and the Valley never settled by them, faculty and license is given so that two settlements can be established in that region, one by the Isleño families described in these Acts, and the other to the free Negros whose commander is Capitán Juan del Rosario Blanco.^[17]

And yet the final resolution of the matter was to be quite different. Doña Luisa Martínez de Villegas made it known in Caracas that, due to the uncertainty and confusion caused by the involvement of both audiencias in the case, she had made a direct appeal to the Council of the Indies to resolve the dispute over Curiepe. The Council reviewed the entire issue and, in October 1731, nullified the decision of the Audiencia of Santo Domingo. In its wisdom the Council recognized two facts: one, that the moreno settlement at Curiepe, although without legal foundation, had become one of the most populous communities in the Tuy; and two, that the intimate link between Juan del Rosario Blanco and the family Blanco Villegas provided the best way out of the impasse. Doña Martínez de Villegas and the other heirs of Juan Blanco de Villegas were ordered to share in possession of Curiepe with the people of color led by Juan del Rosario. The decision of the council confirmed what had become a fait accompli, for the bishop José Félix Valverde, who had replaced Escalona y Calatayud in 1731, decided that since the nearest resident priest was five leagues distant a parish should be established at Curiepe. The first baptism in the new parish was celebrated in May 1732.^[18] The Council of the Indies determined that the Canary Islanders were unnecessary interlopers in what had come to be seen as a Blanco family quarrel at Curiepe, and the council decreed that they be given land at a different site at least fifteen leagues from the coast. In 1733 they received permission from the governor, Martín de Lardizábal, to proceed with the foundation of the pueblo of Panaquire, on the distant bank of the lower Tuy, and by 1737, counting then thirty-two houses of canario residents, Panaquire was organized as a parish and granted a resident priest.^[19] It was from Panaquire that Juan Francisco de León would march to Caracas in 1749 in what would become an armed rebellion against the authority of the king.